A well-functioning capitalist system relies upon workers and employers both possessing sufficient power in the labor market to defend their interests and come to mutually acceptable arrangements. This is not a natural state of affairs, as economists since Adam Smith have warned. Absent worker power, policymakers necessarily step forward with redistribution to ensure widely shared prosperity and regulation to govern the workplace. But America’s enterprise-level system of workplace-by-workplace unionizing and bargaining has proved unworkable. It cannot offer the kind of worker power required to return decision-making power from the federal government back to American communities, employers, and workers where it belongs.

The United States should begin to foster broad-based bargaining models, in which representatives for all workers in a group defined by region, industry, and occupation negotiates with representatives for the counterpart employers. State and local leaders must lead the way in experimenting with these approaches, but federal law can help by getting out of the way. Congress should amend the National Labor Relations Act to clarify that broad-based, sectoral models of bargaining are permissible, and by amending antitrust law to provide safe harbor for employers and workers cooperating in this way. Congress should also permit broad-based collective bargaining agreements to depart from appropriate areas of federal employment law, creating upside for workers and employers to bargain in this way and beginning the process of transitioning back to privately settled agreements. When workers and employers on equal footing agree on an approach different from the federal default, they should be allowed to follow it.